"If you're an overachiever, suddenly you're in seminars with grad students. They would sit there and be like, 'I only know the word in German to describe the feeling I get when I read this chapter,' Then it's some 20-syllable-long word that is so specifically a reference to the feeling and I was like, 'God, I'm out of my league here.'"
"It was really my introduction to smart writing. I remember it feeling like it was an intellectual reach for me. It informed my sense of humor in some ways, like my loving vocabulary words."
"What I love about the book is twofold. One is the book, and the other is the circumstances of the book. Mary Shelley was a teenager [on] a long weekend at Lord Byron's [where they had] a competition for scary stories. She came up with this idea, fully wrote a book, and it's Frankenstein!"
Allison Williams studied English at Yale and experienced both nostalgia and dread in seminars dominated by graduate students using highly specific vocabulary. Childhood reading of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth introduced her to smart, playful language and a fondness for vocabulary. The Odyssey functions for her as a foundational work, combining warfare, mythology, and the archetypal journey home. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein intrigues Williams both as a novel and for its origin story: a teenage author producing the work during a contest among literary figures. Williams revisits Frankenstein nearly every year, finding ongoing resonance in both text and context.
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